The USA Today investigation into maternal mortality and morbidity found issue with maternal mortality review committees. Instead of focusing attention on the quality of care hospitals provide or on advocating for improvements, they tend to focus more on lifestyle choices in their reports on maternal deaths. Representative Jaime Herrera-Beutler (WA) will be in front of the House Energy & Commerce Committee today to discuss her legislation to give states money to improve maternal death review and make reviews uniform so they capture care mistakes and share lessons learned with doctors and hospitals. A similar Senate bill passed the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee this summer. Other bills before Congress to address maternal mortality include:

• The Modernizing Obstetric Medicine Standards or MOMS Act ( 3392) would provide new funding to hospitals staffed with OB-GYNs so they can modernize and improve treatment for pregnant and delivering moms, and identify and prevent potential complications for mom and baby.
• The Maternal Care Access and Reducing Emergencies or CARE Act ( 3363) would create two new federal grant programs. The first grant program would fund pregnancy medical home programs that implement best practices proven to safeguard the health of mother and baby throughout pregnancy. The other grant program would help hospitals and medical schools implement implicit bias training for medical professionals. This bill is based on the work done in North Carolina to prevent pre-term births and Cesarean sections that has narrowed the gap between black and white women in terms of maternal mortality, while also reducing pre-term births.
• The newly introduced Maximizing Outcomes for Moms through Medicaid Improvement and Enhancement of Services or MOMMIES Act would extend full-scope Medicaid services from the current 60 days postpartum to 365 days, recognizing that the postpartum period is a critical window for preventing maternal deaths and reducing complications. The bill would also establish a maternity care home demonstration project (like North Carolina’s model), extend the ACA’s Medicaid primary care payment increase, encourage access to doula care and study the effectiveness of telemedicine for maternity care.

Senator Tammy Duckworth (IL) asserts that the gender imbalance in Congress is part of the problem: “Maybe, just maybe, if we’d already achieved true parity in Congress, the hundreds of expectant or new moms who are estimated to have died in this country since I gave birth to Maile would still be here today, witnessing their babies’ first yawns or smiles.”

In the U.S., the maternal mortality rate has risen sharply in recent decades. From 1990 to 2015, the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 births in most developed nations has been flat or dropping.

SOURCE The Global Burden of Disease 2015 Maternal Mortality study as published in The Lancet medical journal.

Washington State’s maternal mortality rate has remained consistent over this same timeframe, but our state experiences many of the same disparities experienced in other states. Maternal mortality reviews can help address rising rates of maternal deaths and disparities by working with experts and stakeholders to identify and better understand the factors surrounding maternal death in the state.